The Marketer's Handbook: Reassessing Marketing Techniques for Modern Business

MARKETING COMMUNICATION

Application: Communication with Buyers, Sales, Strategy, Revenue Generation, Brand Building

The Concept

This is another vast subject in which people, both academics and practitioners, spend their whole careers. It is difficult to capture the subtlety, experience, complexity, and depth of those who do it really well. It is easy to see, though, the crassness of those who do it badly.

It is not an efficient use of resources to rely on sales teams, major account managers, or fee earning partners in professional service firms to generate revenue alone. Nor is short-term, tactical, sales support enough. Numerous businesses in many different markets have demonstrated that the use of carefully designed marketing communication techniques paves the way for sales; that investment in communications saves money. Communication campaigns can be used to attract initial attention, to stimulate interest, and to induce customers to buy, sometimes without the intervention of a sales person at all. Even in markets that are heavily reliant on a sales person, a retailer, or a consultant to close and deliver a sale, the use of marketing communications can, cost-effectively, attract customers to the point of sale and reassure them afterwards that they did the right thing.

Marketers seeking to optimize the contribution of communications to the sales process should take advantage of ...